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Malcolm Gladwell is getting a lot of attention this week for an article in The New Yorker in which he says that "in the eulogies that followed Jobs's death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But [Walter] Isaacson's biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker." To support this view, Gladwell explains that Jobs lifted the basic idea of the mouse and the graphical user interface from Xerox, introduced the iPod five years after the first MP3 players appeared, and came out with the iPhone 10 years into the smart phone era. He also describes inventors in England who brought about the Industrial Revolution by making incremental improvements rather than grand inventions.

In making this argument, Gladwell misjudges both Jobs' achievement and the nature of invention, I believe. By Gladwell's definition, most of the greatest inventions would be tweaks. The Wright brothers hardly gave birth to the idea of an airplane. Dozens of inventors were trying to build kite-like structures with broad wings and engines to power them; the Wrights methodically gathered all they could learn from those others and figured out how to use a lighter internal-combustion engine and warp the wings for control to succeed far better than anyone else. Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile; it was a familiar novelty by the time he brought out the revolutionary Model T, and his biggest breakthrough, the automated assembly line, which made cars inexpensive, was drawn from earlier technologies such as the carcass disassembly lines at Chicago slaughterhouses. And Thomas Edison was one of a handful of light bulb inventors; his accomplishment was to figure out a bulb that would be more affordable and dependable and long-lasting, and—crucially—to develop a system of power generation and transmission to make it useful in private homes and businesses.

Which is what Jobs did with the iPod. He not only built a better device for storing and playing music; he built the ecosystem to support it, with iTunes. That goes far beyond tweaking. As for the mouse and the icon-based screen interface, Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs (which Gladwell relies on for his article):

The improvements were in not just the details but the entire concept. The mouse at Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple's engineers devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could even drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to select a command in order to do anything, ranging from resizing a window to changing the extension that located a file. The Apple system transformed the desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate things.

What Jobs and Apple did was not tweaking, it was seeing implications and possibilities everyone else was blind to, and pursuing them and making them real even when they seemed impossible. That is real invention. Gladwell writes that "the visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world." But that almost never happens. It certainly didn't for the inventors of the steamboat or the telegraph or the telephone or almost any other of the grandest American innovations. The one startling exception is Xerography. Electrostatic copying, invented in 1938 by Chester Carlson in a room above a hairdresser's shop in Queens, New York, was a genuine utter novelty. It had nothing to do with photography or any other way of reproducing an image that preceded it. But it was a rare exception among inventions, not the rule.

Gladwell does get one thing about Jobs exactly right. He writes that "the great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection." Yes, Jobs was a supreme, and often infuriating, perfectionist, and his perfectionism drove him to some of his greatest innovations. But that does not diminish those innovations.